hout check or restraint. If a reform
in legislation claim too much, there is always a severe reaction
possible, when the final effects will be worse than the evils sought to
be corrected.

The true plan of reform for this city would be to cause the License Law
of 1866 to be re-enacted with certain amendments. The "intoxicating
drinks" mentioned should be held not to include lager-beer or certain
light wines; and garden-drinking might be permitted, under strict police
surveillance.

The Excise Board should be allowed very summary control, however, even
over the German gardens and lager-beer drinking-places, so that, if they
were perverted into places of disturbance and intoxication, the licenses
could be revoked.

[Illustration: THE FORTUNES OF A STREET WAIF. (Fourth Stage.)]

By separating absolutely the licenses for light drinks and those for
rum, whisky, and heavy ales, a vast deal of drunkenness might be
prevented, and yet the foreign habits not be too much interfered with,
and comparatively innocent pleasures permitted. In small towns and
villages, a reasonable compromise would seem to be to allow each
municipality to control the matter in the mode it preferred: some
communities in this way, forbidding all sale of intoxicating liquors,
and others permitting it, under conditions; but each being responsible
for the evils or benefits of the system it adopted.

If a student of history were reviewing the gloomy list of the evils
which have most cursed mankind, which have wasted households, stained
the hand of man with his fellow's blood, sown quarrels and hatreds,
broken women's hearts, and ruined children in their earliest years, bred
poverty and crime, he would place next to the bloody name of War, the
black word--INTEMPERANCE. No wonder that the best minds of modern times
are considering most seriously the soundest means of checking it. If
abstinence were the natural and only means, the noble soul would still
say, in the words of Paul: "It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to
drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth."

But abstinence is not thoroughly natural; it has no chance of a
universal acceptance; and experience shows that other and wider means
must be employed. We must trust to the imperceptible and widely-extended
influences of civilization, of higher tastes, and more refined
amusements on the masses. We must employ the powers of education, and,
above all, the boundless force of Religion,